Frank Bruni's column in today's New York Times laments the death of the American Dream -- that this generation will hand off a better world filled with greater opportunity to the next generation. As so often happens with latte-sipping MSM pundits, Bruni weeps bitter tears for our current plight and fails to note the (big fat GOP) Elephant in the Room -- when the Dream died, who killed it, and how we -- progressive Democrats -- can fight to create a new, better dream.
Follow me under the Umber Squiggle as we illuminate Mr. Bruni...
Mr. Bruni...
More and more I get the sense that we’ve lost it, and by “it” I mean the optimism that was always the lifeblood of this luminous experiment, the ambition that has been its foundation, the swagger that made us so envied and emulated and reviled.
Hmmm. Interesting. I bet many of us on this site feel the same way. I know I do. Let's play detective for a moment. Maybe the truth is hiding in plain sight, right there in Bruni's column. Let's see...
In a lengthy memo that he shared with Politico late last year, the Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik assessed what he called “a decade of anger and disaffection,” noting that for 10 years in a row, according to polling by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal, the percentage of Americans who believed that the United States was on the wrong track exceeded the percentage who thought it was on the right track. That’s a change in the very character of the country.
Ahhh! Now we're getting somewhere. "For 10 years in a row..." That would be...let's see...2004. Who was President then? George W. Bush. In fact, 2004 was the year that Bush, Rove & Cheney waged a diabolical fear and smear campaign to win a second term.
So what did Dubya do that Bruni won't notice? It's Bush's biggest, most egregious sin and nobody talks about it. Here it is...
Bush destroyed the American Narrative -- the story we Americans told ourselves for 231 years (1776-2007) that provided what Bruni calls "the swagger that made us so envied and emulated and reviled."
What was the American Narrative? That amongst all the nations of the world, the United States of America is the ultimate Can-Do nation. We built the Transcontinental Railroad (a visionary alliance of government and private industry). We ended the Depression and won a two-front war. We landed a man on the moon, and returned him safely to earth (another visionary alliance of government and private industry). We created the Internet (yet another visionary alliance of government and private industry).
Bush & Company put the first bullet into our National Myth with their criminally incompetent handling of the Iraq War -- specifically the endless unearned victory laps. The final nail in this coffin -- and, mercifully, the de facto end of the Dubya's Reign of Error -- was his "Throw-Up-His-Hands-And-Give-Up" criminal negligence after Hurricane Katrina. A great city died. Bush and Rove's response was to do nothing. Read the article at the link...especially Senator Mary Landrieu, who had watched the Bushies move in tons of equipment as a backdrop for a Dubya photo op. After Bush left, well....
“I could not believe that the president of the United States, staged by Karl Rove himself, had come down to the city of New Orleans and basically put up a stage prop. It was like you had gone to a studio in California and filmed a movie. They put the props up and the minute we were gone they took them down. All the dump trucks were gone. All the Coast Guard people were gone. It was an empty spot with one little crane. It was the saddest thing I have ever seen in my life. At that moment I knew what was going on and I’ve been a changed woman ever since. It truly changed my life.”
Bush and Rove didn't -- don't -- believe in Bruni's Dream of a Can-Do Build-A-Miracle America. The tragedy is that when Bush went down, he took the narrative with him. Bruni at least got this right -- nothing has come along to replace that dream. Obama's election in 2008 was a Hail Mary by the voting public. "The Audacity of Hope" then ran into a buzzsaw of Wall Street chutzpah and cynical Republican take-no-prisoners obstruction.
What should the Dems do? Simple, but not easy --
Reclaim the Narrative. Own it. Use it as a weapon against the GOP nihilists and cynics.
The destruction of our national narrative began with Reagan's "Government IS the problem" shibboleth. You'll notice that every great "can-do" program was an alliance of government and private industry.
Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are great models of how to reclaim the narrative. Create a vision of the country we want to live in, and then describe the means to achieve it. The first step -- the one that Bruni refuses to take -- is to "own" how we got into this mess.